HDD vs SSD Lifespans?

[Cerulean]

First off, I don't care about data retention; this has nothing to do with the question.

What I am curious about is whether HDDs or SSDs have a longer lifespan. For example, if you were folding, which would be the better? Don't SSDs have a limited number of writes?

Just curious about some stuff.

 

[InvisiBill]

Flash memory does have a finite number of writes available. However, the vast majority of PC users, even enthusiasts, will never come close to that limit.

http://www.tgdaily.com/hardware-features/39204-intel-claims-ssd-superiority-tries-to-dispel-myths
Intel says that their drives will handle 100GB of writes per day for five years. In their internal testing, most people used 2-3GB per day, with the highest being under 20GB. If you can do 10x what Intel's heaviest user did, constantly, you might cut the lifespan of the drive down to 3 years.

And that article was from 2008. With TRIM on the new drives, you should be rewriting fewer unnecessary bits, meaning a reduction in the number of writes. That means it should last even longer.

Here's some info I posted on SD yesterday:
FYI, my 80GB X-25M is showing 1735 hours powered on and 381.53GB of writes. That comes out to 5.28GB/day for ~72 days (delivered to me on 11/19 = 79 days ago). I have my OS, user profiles, and most common apps installed on the SSD. I have a 1GB pagefile on the SSD (which doesn't get used much due to 6GB of RAM) and I always disable disk caching in my browser. The Intel SSD Toolbox is scheduled to run overnight since the OS doesn't support TRIM. I have not made any other SSD-specific changes on my XP x64 install (partitions cloned from my HDD). This system runs 24x7, crunching dnetc on the CPU and both GPUs when I'm not using it.